Hot mics so often get people in hot water — and sometimes reveal cold hearts. Such was the case with a Contra Costa County, California, school board Zoom meeting that members thought was private but wasn’t. As a result, the world heard their private thoughts on parents who complain about COVID-19 school closings. It wasn’t pretty.
As Reason reports:
“They want their babysitters back,” Lisa Brizendine, a trustee of Oakley Union Elementary School District, told her colleagues during a pre-meeting session that they believed was not open to the public.
School board member Kim Beede mentioned a negative interaction with a frustrated parent, then described her own mindset: “B[***]h, if you are going to call me out, I am going to f[***] you up.”
Another member of the board theorized that parents want their kids to go back to school so they can spend the day getting high.
The board also discussed whether it would be possible to change the public comment portion of their meetings so that members of the public would be cut off automatically after three minutes of speaking time.
Roughly eight minutes of footage were recorded before the board members realized that they were not alone.
Wow, classy people. The “getting high” comment was made by board member Richie Masadas. He stated “that parents just want their kids back in school so they can sit home and smoke pot,” ABC7 tells us. “He says when your kids are home there is no more Friday.”
“‘My brother had a delivery service for medical marijuana [why am I not surprised?] and he delivered to parents while their kids were at school,’ Masadas said,” ABC continued. “Other members can be heard laughing.” One called the statement “awesome.”
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Adding perspective, commentator Andrea Widburg notes that the members “not only mocked parents behind their backs, but seemed to bond together as they did it.”
“Then the giggling stopped as the board slowly realized that their Zoom meeting was public, not private,” Widburg continues. “The ‘babysitter’ woman, board president Lisa Brizendine, tried to backtrack after their hilarity, spouting political pieties, but it was too late. The cat was out of the bag.… They really, really, really hate parents, and obviously, they despise students.”
Brizendine resigned earlier today, avoiding the messiness that could result from a Change.org petition that has been created for the purposes of removing the board members.
Widburg also provides some background on the offending officials, and their resumes don’t seem overly impressive. The pretense and hypocrisy is strong with them, though.
For example, Widburg presents Brizendine’s political statement, which begins thus: “Students should be at the forefront of all of our decision making as a board as their needs should always come first. The teachers and staff are the backbone of the schools and their commitment to their students should never be underscored, [sic] they are amazing, caring and essential members of the school community.”
Uh, yeah, whatever. (Also, call me a grammar Nazi, but I’ll point out that a person who can’t write a statement intended for public consumption without a comma splice probably doesn’t belong on a school board. Brizendine is a former teacher, too.)
Hot mics, however, can be beautiful things. It’s instructive when pseudo-elites (or wannabes) are exposed for what they are: Supercilious, imperious, uncaring would-be autocrats oblivious to how their position is meant to be one of service.
Oh, for the cynics out there, know that not everyone is like this. For example, leftists were perhaps very disappointed when ex-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mails were hacked; they revealed only that the private and public Palins were basically the same person.
The Oakley school board members’ comments, however, were indefensible statements in defense of the indefensible. We’ve long known that as a rule, children are neither imperiled by the coronavirus nor readily spread it; and studies have shown that schools are, if anything, less likely than the wider community to be sources of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
So what can be concluded other than many teachers want to be able to stay home and still draw their normal salary?
But here’s what’s so offensively intolerable about this: Many workers — from police to medical professionals to firemen to grocery store employees — assume more risk than do teachers. Yet they’re on the job. And there’s a simple solution if a person finds his profession’s level of risk unacceptable.
Resignation.
Moreover, the “babysitters” comment may be significant. I suspect that one thing many teachers like about the current situation is that they don’t have to deal with classroom discipline issues. And this brings us to the grain of truth in the school board members’ comments.
In reality, one reason many parents seek schooling’s resumption is that having their kids at home 24/7 is taxing. Yet consider not just the board members’ attitudes, but the other outrages remote learning has brought to light.
Parents more often now witness the indoctrination — the “white privilege” and critical-race propaganda, the revisionist history, and other woke nonsense — to which their children are subject. Then there was the nine-year-old boy suspended by his school in Louisiana(!) because a BB gun was visible during remote “learning” in his own bedroom.
Now, question: Given today’s education’s general nature, do you really want your child in these government schools’ care? Do you want woke ideologues shaping your kid’s heart, mind, and soul?
For most of history, children were socialized within the family unit; they weren’t thrust into a classroom with 30 other kids and managed by a relative stranger. In other words, homeschooling is the historic norm.
Of course, I realize that mostly gone are the days when sons would go hunt or work the fields with dad and daughters would help mom with chores; parents and children today often live very separate lives, and it can be difficult for people to manage both work and kids suddenly confined to their homes. Yet perhaps the most important knowledge imparted, quite accidentally, via remote learning is that today’s schools too often are not friends of parents, the country, or the kids.
So appreciate the hot mic — and consider dropping government schooling like a hot potato.
